It’s an oft-cited fact that customers today are more demanding than they ever have been. One of the best ways to meet these demands – by building a multichannel contact center – is something most companies are in varying stages of accomplishing. Unfortunately, not all contact centers are getting it right.

Stuck with technological limitations in place thanks to cobbled together legacy systems or older, less flexible hosted solutions, many organizations are offering customers multiple channels, but those channels are often siloed, isolated and drawing customer data from a variety of less-than-reliable sources. The result is a stunted customer experience with stops and starts, transfers, conflicting information, duplications and errors. Needless to say, this is not wowing customers.

San Ramon, California-based Five9 (News - Alert) has long been considered one of the standout solutions for call center on-demand technology, but the company is attracting some significant praise with the release of its new version of its flagship cloud contact center product that includes four new native multichannel applications (email, chat, social, and mobile) as well as an intelligent technology layer called Five9 Connect.

The Five9 Summer Release 2014, as it’s being called, has been praised by research analysts and users alike. The former, who widely recognize the importance of an easy-to-use and properly integrated multichannel solution in order to offer the type of omnichannel support that customers today are demanding.

"The tendency of customers to gravitate towards complex multichannel interactions makes it more important than ever for service providers like Five9 to provide a clean, simple way for enterprises to manage those interactions,” said Keith Dawson (News - Alert), principal analyst with Ovum. “With Five9 Connect and the other enhancements in this release, Five9 is helping produce a seamless, easy customer experience."

Five9, it appears, has recognized that customers will remain most loyal to whichever company makes life easiest for them. When it comes to customer support, customers want it to be omnichannel, but they also want it to be fast and easy to navigate instead of causing more headaches when the purpose of customer support is to relieve customer headaches.

"In the very competitive market for multi-channel and omnichannel contact center resources, Five9 has done an admirable job of accomplishing its goal of 'smart simplicity’,” said Dan Miller (News - Alert), senior analyst and founder at Opus Research.

With the Five9 Summer Release 2014, the company would appear to have correctly sensed the mood of the call center on-demand market and fulfilled its needs admirably.